The whole topic of gay and not gay has always been interesting to me because the line of thought is alien to me. I consider myself hyper-straight in the sense that I have been sexually attracted to women since before the age of 4... I always knew I liked looking at women... I liked the way their pants fit :) just didn't actually know why until I was 8 or so. But the notion of seeing men sexually has always been fascinating to me because I stretch my mind and still cannot see it. What do women see in men? I don't know. What do men see in men? I don't know. But as a man of the U.S. I have always believed that being gay was an identity based on what you do. A recent NPR show was discussing being gay in the middle east. There they did not so much identify gay as what you do but as who you are. That's a tough thing to wrap one's mind around... identity not based on what one does. Just about every kind of identity in the U.S. seems wrapped around what one does, what one has or his position.

So given this new mind-twister, the MIT Gaydar makes assumptions based on what? I'd be interested to know. Surely it can't be based on associations alone. If all my friends were black, would that indicate that I am also black? My tendency to burn in the sunlight would tend to disagree with that. I'd be interested to know how MIT defines gay to better understand how it makes determinations.

Damned SMS and IM are killing all languages all over the planet.

My wife's a psychologist and we have discussed such people. The answer to what it's like to be one is depressingly simple. They have no morals to trouble them at all; no conscience, no guilt. They're happy as if they had ethics and compassion.

There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.

Seriously though, how can you browse the web *without* adblock? I've shoulder surfed people doing it, and I'd rather eat my own hand.

You can't have a problem when you don't know any better.

with the size of USB drives you can buy for under $20, I would dare to say that the same experiment would probably have the same results over here in the states (at least with cable and DSL). If I strapped just an 8GB USB drive to a pigeon's leg and had it fly the same distance in around an hour, there's no way my internet connection could beat ~8GB/hr, or approximately 18Mbps (if I calculated correctly).

I'm sorry, butchery of the english language DOES make someone dumb.

Bullshit. If you want the job, you do whatever the employer asks to prove you have the qualifications. Unless you work is universally known, like John Carmack, or Linus Torvalds, you're never too good to take an entrance exam.

women have *never* felt comfortable working topless.

All the non-techie people I know continue to use P2P like it was the year 2000. It's only the people who know their oats that use any other services or protocols, and most of those guys switched when Metallica went apeshit at the start of the century.

Nothing changed over the xIAA lawsuits, as far as I can tell.

Because it would suck. What happens when you slash, but your opponent blocks? Now your hands are pointing at the ground because it didn't physically stop YOU... but in the game your sword is at chest level. There are other issues as well.